The Social Contract

Philosophical Journal #2 Chapter four is about Egoism, Altruism, and the Social Contract. Egoism is defined as someone who is primarily concerned with their own well-being. There are two kinds of Egoism, Descriptive Egoism and Psychological Egoism. Descriptive Egoism holds that people are basically self-centered or selfish; that is, people primarily pursue their own self-interest. This is true at birth, we are all born as a self-centered baby. We cry when we need something and we don’t…

Rousseau’s, The Social Contract, describes his theory on how to establish a successful society with the problems that are commonly faced in a commercial society. He also aims to determine if, in a civil society, whether freedom is possible or not. Rousseau opens his book by stating, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (1), meaning, that although man is born free in terms of nature, society places holds, or chains, on citizens, restraining them from their natural freedom and…

help Thrasymachus, the best possible outcome will be to reconstruct his argument. The first claim will be that all people follow the laws set forth, regardless if such rules are good or bad. Why individuals to this can be explained with basic social contract theory that all people give up their unbounded freedom for protection. The sovereign, who in turn, in order to see to their safety, makes up such laws that help maintain order and protects the people. Offering this to the people they live in…

The Social Contract is assumed to be the source that tells its contractors how to behave. But in order to hold to the morals given by the Contract and not to violate them, one must already have a certain source of moral behaviour. After all, in order to refrain from violating the Contract, there must be a morality that tells the contractors that violation of that same Contract is immoral. In short: one must have a pre-existing idea of what is good and bad, prior to the Contract, in order to…

The Social Contract theory also explains why people would give up their freedom to cooperatively create a fair government, while also stating that it is by the will of the people that governments are created therefore if the government fails to secure the rights of the people and does not work towards the people's wish, then citizens have the power to rebel against the government and establish a greater government then the former. Another positive aspect of the Social Contract theory is that…

Wollstonecraft. Specifically, it argues that Wollstonecraft’s political and sociological views are radical for her time. Additionally, this paper hypothesizes that Wollstonecraft’s vision suggests she believes the classic contract theorists include women in their conceptions of the social contract theory on the basis of their unfounded claims that women are irrational beings and deserving of justifiable subordination. Thus, allowing classic contractarians to rationalize their exclusion of…

institutions and enforcement; he calls this the law of nature, and claims that it is the result of human nature. Hobbes believed that people desire peace instead of anarchy. In order to maintain peace, society needs to introduce a social contract or covenant. The contract establishes that there must be a transfer of ones rights to someone else, allowing for the escape of the state of nature. Still, there is no guarantee that the covenant will be followed, and there needs to be someone that is…

privileged class has the ability to institutionalize contracts that protects the privileged class while suppressing those who are not in this class. For example, the privileged class of white males have social contracts institutionalized to suppress women and people of colour. This suppression may not even be intentional or in ill will. They may just have a willful ignorance to the injustices that are caused by the domination contract. A social contract is an implicit agreement between members…

humanity's potential and also in their beliefs about the proper role of government, but each philosopher had a written social contract including their theories about a government’s structure which were all similar. A social contract is an agreement by which they give up their freedom for an organized society but, each scholar had a very different concept of what the social contract, people's expectations for governmental services, should include. For example, Hobbes believed that the population…

political state. The state of nature is a concept used in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law to denote the hypothetical conditions of what the lives of people might have been like before societies came into existence. Looking how each of these philosophers looked at a social contract, both Hobbes and Locke had different views on a social contract then we believe it to be.…